Classifying YouTube Comments Based on Sentiment and Type of Sentence

TL;DR

This paper presents a machine learning approach to classify YouTube comments by sentiment and sentence type, aiding content creators in identifying relevant feedback to enhance viewer engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel classification method tailored for YouTube comments, combining statistical measures and machine learning, addressing challenges of informal and poorly constructed comments.

Findings

The approach achieves high F1 scores in classifying comments.

Statistical measures combined with machine learning outperform baseline methods.

The method effectively handles the informal nature of YouTube comments.

Abstract

As a YouTube channel grows, each video can potentially collect enormous amounts of comments that provide direct feedback from the viewers. These comments are a major means of understanding viewer expectations and improving channel engagement. However, the comments only represent a general collection of user opinions about the channel and the content. Many comments are poorly constructed, trivial, and have improper spellings and grammatical errors. As a result, it is a tedious job to identify the comments that best interest the content creators. In this paper, we extract and classify the raw comments into different categories based on both sentiment and sentence types that will help YouTubers find relevant comments for growing their viewership. Existing studies have focused either on sentiment analysis (positive and negative) or classification of sub-types within the same sentence types (e.g., types of questions) on a text corpus. These have limited application on non-traditional text corpus like YouTube comments. We address this challenge of text extraction and classification from YouTube comments using well-known statistical measures and machine learning models. We evaluate each combination of statistical measure and the machine learning model using cross validation and $F_1$ scores. The results show that our approach that incorporates conventional methods performs well on the classification task, validating its potential in assisting content creators increase viewer engagement on their channel.